Topic: WorldNetDaily
In touting a hearing on its moribund defamation lawsuit against Esquire magazine, a unbylined Sept. 30 WND article does its best to pretend that it's still alive and kicking. Indeed, it's not until the 12th paragraph that WND gets around to mentioning that the lawsuit has been dismissed.
The article continues:
Klayman has filed a motion with the D.C. Circuit federal appeals court to throw out Esquire’s pleadings and end the case in WND’s favor. He notes that Esquire, in its briefs to the lower court in D.C. and now to the appeals court, claims the blog post had “tags” that would indicate to readers that its article was satirical and not a serious news story.
But Klayman argues the original article, which prompted a flood of response to WND by concerned readers and other media who took it seriously, had no such tags.
He has submitted to the court screen shots of the article taken the day it was published accompanied by an affidavit from Farah testifying there were no tags.
Since the article was published, Esquire has inserted below it a list of hyperlinked “tags,” or related article categories. The list in small, faint type consists of key words and phrases, including “Where’s the Birth Certificate,” “Jerome Corsi,” “Birthers” and “Humor.”
“They lied about what was originally published,” Klayman told WND in March. “They lied to the lower court, and now they’ve lied to the appellate court.”
As we documented in March, it's Farah and Klayman who appear to be lying. The screenshots WND submitted cut off the part of the post where the tags normally appear.
That makes the affidavit by Farah very interesting. He swears "under penalty of perjury" that he "took a screen capture of a true and correct copy of the Blog Post." But since the post submitted as evidence cuts off the tags, it cannot be a "true and correct copy."
Also, we're pretty sure the original blog post doesn't have a rectangular border around it like the one submitted as evidence. That's more proof it's not a "true and correct copy."
This means there may be a case to be made that Farah has committed perjury.
And, as per usual, the article doesn't mention the key reason that the lawsuit had been dismissed: Farah, in the judge's words, "immediately recognized the satiric nature of the Blog Post," as demonstrated by his public statements following the initial posting, until it "became inconvenient" for him to do so.
WND is actually inviting its readers to attend the hearing. Unfortunately, we have to work for a living and are unable to attend -- we would like to see Farah and Klayman deal with perjury instead of the frivolous lawsuit it intended to discuss.
